Survival Instinct by Andy Chambers

Author:Andy Chambers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: BL Publishing
Published: 2005-05-05T07:00:00+00:00

7: DOWNTOWN

‘Burn the filthy mutants!’

Sermons of the Arch Zealot

‘How THE HELL did you find me?’

It was Donna’s first question after Avignon had hauled her up out of the monster’s lair like a fish on a line. Tessera had just looked superior and all knowing at the time so she didn’t hear the story properly until she wheedled it out of Tola later. Not that it ever took much wheedling to get Tola talking; it was shutting her up that was the real trick.

It turned out that Tola and Avignon had trailed Donna after she left Hagen’s Place in Glory Hole. Both of them knew Donna well enough to understand there wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance that she wouldn’t go to the warehouse to find out more. They had followed her until she climbed down to the third tier, at which point they had to go back and pay a toll-crank to get down since neither of them fancied emulating Donna’s high-wire routine.

They had arrived in time to see Donna caught cold by the bounty hunters at Strakan’s warehouse. When Donna made a break for it they strafed Kell’s sniper’s nest in the tower while she ran inside, which went a

long way towards explaining why he hadn’t shot her in the back at the time - the little toad was pinned down by their fire.

Once Donna had disappeared inside, Tola and Avignon ran off and hid further around the tier. They had waited for a while and when Shallej and Kell came out empty-handed they had known that she had somehow escaped the warehouse. That’s when they hightailed it out of there to tell Tessera what was going on. Simple.

Of course that didn’t answer Donna’s question: how the hell had they found her beneath Dust Falls? She determined to get the rest of the story out of Tessera at the next rest stop. The gang were descending into the Abyss now, heading for Down Town, which suited Donna just fine. In truth, Donna was rather touched that Tessera had gone out of her way to find her in the first place, so she stuck with the gang out of old loyalties, secretly revelling in the chance to relax a little and stop watching her back.

They were moving through layer after layer of ancient hab-domes, access ways and waste pipes, working their way back along the well-worn paths of the Abyss. The deeper they went, the more crushed down the ruins of the old hive became, compacted beneath the weight of successive generations of demolition and construction. More often than not they followed fracture lines between the strata; an old transit rail might give a few hundred metres of useable passageway beneath its rails before giving way to a sagging plaza whose collapsed roof had left enough crawl spaces to reach a semi-intact street.

They paused at a crossroads of sorts. A cracked waste pipe breached the floor, coming in from one side and crossing their path. Tessera seemed uncertain about which way to take and Donna took the opportunity to talk to her away from the others.

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